It's also possible that "identity" works with a trigger, but I believe that databases that support an identity-type column provide a method to make the last generated ID available that Hibernate uses to store the ID into the object in the Session (and second-level cache, if you're using one). You'd probably have to code up something specific to make the trigger's assigned ID simmilarly available. [ January 14, 2005: Message edited by: David Harkness ]